Can You Explain Gravity to Me
[NOTE: this is an old post (circa 23 Feb 07) that I never published because I never got around to connecting all the topics with a narrative of the event. Now I've forgotten, but I think it's still worth sharing]
Discussion after a talk to a Berkeley class by Drew Endy & George Church
Drew: Humankind doesn’t understand anything.
Student: Yes we do. We undertstand all sorts of stuff. We understand physics, for instance.
Drew: Ok. Can you explain how gravity works to me?
Student: Well… well, we have a good understanding about how gravity makes things behave. We can predict how it works.
Drew: “So, we have an operational understanding… [of many objects].
What kind of understanding do we need to engineer biology?
How come there isn’t a garage biohacker sort of … foo camp… ? (getting closer with makezine 07: backyard biology and DIYbio.org)
Drew: But could / should we have garage biohackers?
“It’s not bioterror I worry about… It’s bioerror.”
Biology Property Rights
PloS preprint (Arti Rai & James Boyle:
Synthetic Biology: Caught Between Property Rights, the Public Domain, and the Commons
- public domain sounds nice but hard to incentivize a community to contribute
- contacts work as long as no leaking b/w agreed parties
- -great article, but dissatisfying
- (Maybe TK is writing a new license)
Activity